Diverging Bitcoin & Crypto Worlds

I think #Bitcoin and #Crypto worlds do diverge. I see the foundation of #Bitcoin to be censorship resistance, and, as a result, unconfiscatability and freedom of monetary transactions. Others see the core of it as digital scarcity building hard and sound money - a long-term store of value (the second requires the first; however the first can also exist even without the second). I see #Crypto as a democratization of speculatory financial activities and gambling. Don’t get me wrong: I say that without a negative connotation since I do believe both are important as a form of games. Children play games to develop their intelligence, and adults play economic games and gamble with skin in the game because of a similar reason: it is a way of competition and evolution of economic intelligent agents. If one day there would be an AI, it should start with similar simulations. Another related goal of crypto is to make money which is not hard, but liquid money (becoming easy money as a result). Crypto talks a lot about decentralization, but in reality, there is no real decentralization; they use an illusion of it as a way to distract regulators from attacking.

This difference explains why crypto people do not understand Bitcoin - and why Bitcoin is not interested in crypto. In fact, they do not have any intersections at all!

There is more to the equation: #cypherpunk, where Bitcoin has emerged, goes beyond what Bitcoin can do today since it is more concerned about privacy than the existence of hard and sound money (thus I do not consider projects like Monero or Grin to be crypto projects). However, Bitcoin still shares a lot with it, since real censorship resistance and freedom of transactions is impossible w/o privacy - however, the tradeoffs bitcoiners and cypherpunk are willing to pay are different (that’s why there is still no confidential transactions in Bitcoin since the absence of hidden inflation is more important for bitcoiners than privacy). BTW, #RGB is bridging this gap, but that’s another story. Finally, there is a crypto-anarchism, which, for the first look is similar to cypherpunk - but in reality, it is much closer to the crypto world than bitcoin. Crypto anarchists are not worried about the nature of money; their focus is privacy as means of breaking attribution and having any form of financial activity be non-attributable. However, my own position touches all of these spheres (and to none of them in full): what I am looking for (and contribute to the building) is private, uncensorable, unregulatable agoric finance still allowing voluntary disclosure. Decentralization here is not a fetish: it may still contain naturally-centralized parts (like asset issuers for shares or bonds), but in other cases, decentralization may be necessary for maintaining censorship resistance (like DEXes for the secondary markets of the shares). This is the vision we have in our Pandora Prime company building Pandora Network project, leveraging our developments in Bitcoin, Lightning and #RGB smart contracts made during past years as a part of LNP/BP Standards Association.